3 ms·
> If the UI of an application involves a huge deeply nested menu of actions that directly modify the visual look of the data being worked on, then a Ribbon migh
by cirgue 9y ago
> If the UI of an application involves a huge deeply nested menu of actions that directly modify the visual look of the data being worked on, then a Ribbon might be the right paradigm.
I would add to this 'and your user base already has a well-established set of paradigms in mind when using your product.' Part of the reason that the Ribbon works for MS products is that they had to make their UI backwards compatible with decades of user intuition, which required carrying forward a lot of baggage. The Ribbon is necessary because they not only have to include a huge array of functionality, they also have to include dozens of ways to accomplish the same task presented so that they feel familiar to an enormous and diverse user base. If you could design Word/Excel from the ground up to optimize for efficiency and usability, but with zero prior user expectations, the UI would probably be radically different.
- com2kid 9y ago> If you could design Word/Excel from the ground up to optimize for efficiency and usability, but with zero prior user expectations, the UI would probably be radically different. Word and Excel have so many options, I am not sure if there is an intuitive way to design the UI. At some point, software of a certain complexity is going to have a learning curve. Making it so that things are placed naturally along that curve is probably the best that can be done. Excel also needs to be optimized for power users, and those power user optimizations align with much different UX goals than making something easy to use and discover. There is this weird cliff in the middle of Excel use, where doing basic things is pretty simple thanks to the ribbon, doing slightly harder things is frustrating, and then doing all this super cool advanced stuff really fast is actually pretty damn easy if you watch a couple hours of youtube tutorial videos, but there is no chance of figuring it out on your own!